LIFE BY THE SON

Life By The Son

Expository Studies in 1 John

by Ray C. Stedman

LIFE BY THE SON

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946 (renewed 1973), 1956 and © 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. Those marked TLB are from The Living Bible, Paraphrased (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971) and are used by permission. Those marked Phillips are from The New Testament in Modern English (rev. ed.), copyright © 1958,1960, 1972 by J.B. Phillips. Those marked ASV are from the American Standard Version of the Bible. Those marked TEV are from the TodayÕs English Version of the Bible (Copyright © American Bible Society 1976).

Discovery Books are published by World Books, Publisher in cooperation with Discovery Foundation, Palo Alto, California.

ISBN 0-8499-2918-0

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-51449

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

Book One: Maintaining Fellowship

1. Life with Father (1 John 1:1-4)

2. God Is Light (1 John 1:5)

3. The Man Who Ignores Light (1 John 1:3-7)

4. The Man Who Denies Sin (1 John 1:8, 9)

5. The Man Who Rationalizes Sin (1 John 1:10-2:2)

6. Counterfeits and Reflectors (1 John 2:3-6)

7. Visible Christianity (1 John: 7-11)

8. Growing and Maturing in Grace (1 John 2:12-14)

9. The Enemy Around Us (1 John 2:15-17)

Book Two: Maintaining Truth

10. The Nature of Heresy (1 John 2:18-19)

11. The Hard Core of Truth (1 John 2:20-21)

12. No Son, No Father (1 John 2:22, 23)

13. The Living Word (1 John 2:24, 25)

14. The Teaching Spirit (1 John 2:26, 27)

15. The Coming Day (1 John 2:28)

Book Three: Maintaining Righteousness

16. Recognizing the Unrecognized (1 John 2:29-3:1)

17. What Shall We Be? (1 John 3:2,3)

18. The Greatest Revolution (1 John 3:4,5)

19. The Mystery of Righteousness (1 John 3:6, 7)

20. The Mystery of Evil (1 John 3:8)

21. When the Spirit Says No (1 John 3:9)

22. One or the Other (1 John 3:10)

Book Four: Maintaining Love

23. The Path of Love (1 John 3:11-18)

24. The Course of Hate (1 John 3:11-18)

25. The Christian's Tranquilizer (1 John 3:19, 20)

26. Power in Prayer (1 John 3:21-24)

27. When Unbelief Is Right (1 John 4:1-6)

28. God Is Greater (1 John 4:4-6)

29. Love Made Visible (1 John 4:7-12)

30. Love's Accomplishments (1 John 4:13-21)

Book Five: Maintaining Assurance

31. We Shall Overcome (1 John 5:1-5)

32. Why Do We Believe? (1 John 5:6-13)

33. Praying Boldly (1 John 5:14-17)

34.Christian Certainty (1 John 5:18-21)

Preface

Watchman Nee, in his book What Shall This Man Do?, calls the apostle John "John the Mender," the Apostle whose special mission it is to call believers back to the strong foundational faith which they had from the begin beginning. In such a role John writes this first epistle to believers who were struggling with their relationships--both with God and with other Christians. They were finding it difficult to love one another, and they were plagued by false teachers who subtly fed their disaffections by implying that they could be both doctrinally sound and unloving. They could be "right with God" and ignore the tiresome clamor of brothers in need around them. This is an old problem among believers. Isaiah, in chapter 58 of his prophecy, attempted to snap the Israelites to attention, calling them away from empty religious forms which served only to bolster their own egos toward the reality of true worship; that of loosening the bonds of the oppressed. Worship of God, true worship, has to begin with a relationship with God--and this John's readers had. But if that relationship does not issue in fellowship with others who have the same relationship, then something is wrong. This is the issue John addresses in this letter. What are the obstacles to fellowship, and how can we deal with them effectively?

Book One

Maintaining Fellowship

Chapter One

Life with Father

1 John 1:1-4

The apostle John lived during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, whose cruelties exceeded all those before him, including even the infamous Nero. The Church was under great attack at the time John was writing this letter, not only from the direct and frontal violence of the Roman empire, but also from the subtle and much more dangerous attacks of various false ideas which had arisen from within.

We live in the same kind of situation; today much of the Christian church around the world is under direct and frontal attack. Here in America we are free from that, (for which we ought to give thanks every day), but we are daily exposed to a powerful barrage of devious errors. The Christian faith is threatened with a subtle undermining that removes all vestige of vitality, leaving us dull, dead, and useless. Therefore this letter of John's has tremendous significance for us today.

As you may know, it was the task of the apostles to lay the true foundation of the church, the only foundation which men can lay, which is Jesus Christ. But each of the apostles had a specific function in laying this foundation. Paul did not do the same thing as John; Peter had a different task than either Paul or John, and Jude was called to yet another ministry. God committed something original to each of these men to be passed along to us.

Watchman Nee, in his very helpful book, What Shall This Man Do?, suggests that the ministries of John, Peter, and Paul can be distinguished and characterized by God. Peter, for instance, was a fisherman, and we are told in the Gospels that the Lord found him casting a net into the sea. That work of fishing for men is characteristic of the apostle Peter. He is always beginning things, initiating new programs. To him were committed the keys of the Kingdom by which he could open the door to the new things God was introducing. On the day of Pentecost he used one of those keys and led 3,000 new believers into the kingdom of God.

To the apostle Paul, however, a different task was committed. When Paul was called he was a tentmaker. He made things. The ministry committed to the apostle Paul, then, was to build. Not only did he lay the foundation, he built upon it. He called himself "a wise master-builder" and to this mighty apostle was committed the task of building the great doctrinal foundation upon which the Christian faith rests.

To Call People Back

But John is different from both of these. When John was called, he was found mending his nets. John is a mender. His written ministry comes when the church has been in existence for several decades and at a time when apostasy had begun to creep in. A voice was needed to call people back to the original foundations. The ministry of the apostle John was to call men back to truth. When we begin to drift, when some false concept creeps into our thinking or our actions, it is John who is ordained of the Lord to call us back, to mend the nets, and to set things straight.

The first four verses constitute his introduction to this first letter.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life--the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us--that which we the tasks each was performing when he was called of have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing this that our joy [or your joy] may be complete (1 John 1:1-4)

Three things are highlighted for us in this introduction: a relationship, a fellowship, and a joy. But all must begin with this matter of relationship, for John is concerned first about the family of God. It was Peter's task to talk about the kingdom of God and Paul about the church of God, but John is concerned with the family of God. (These are all the same thing, viewed from three different angles.) It is into the intimacy of the family circle, now, that the apostle John takes us. Thus this letter can be properly described as introducing us to life with the Father, the intimacy of the family circle of God.

Read through the letter and you will find that John gives four different reasons for writing it. One is in verse 4: "And we are writing this that your joy may be complete." Then in chapter 2, verse 1, he says, "My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin." And in chapter 2, verse 26, he gives us the third reason: "I write this to you about those who would deceive you." In chapter 5, verse 13, he gives us the fourth reason: "I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life" (italics mine).

If you think about these four reasons for a moment you will find something remarkable about them. He is first concerned about the joy of companionship which is, of course, the solution to the problem of loneliness. Nothing is more helpful in curing loneliness than a family circle. When you get lonely, where do you want to go? Home, to the family! So John writes, "I write this that your joy may be full" (KJV), answering the fear and problem of loneliness.

Then he says, "I am writing thisÉso that you may not sin." Here he is dealing with another great threat to human happiness, the problem of guilt.

Again he says, "I write this to you about those who would deceive you." In other words he is writing to protect us, in order that we might be free from deception. Here is another great problem area of life. Where do we get answers? How do we know what is true? This letter is written so that we might be free from deception.

Finally he says, "I am writing this to assure you"--that you might find security, freedom from fear. Who of us is not concerned with that? How do you find your way through life successfully? How do we know we are not going to fail? John says, "I write this in order that you might have assurance," be secure, free from the fear of failure.

Beginnings

Now let us go back to these opening verses and see what he has to say. First, he is talking about a relationship.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life--

It is evident he is talking about a person, whom, he says is "from the beginning." This is one of the favorite phrases of the apostle John. There are at least three "beginnings" in the Bible. The Bible opens with the phrase, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). That is the beginning of the material creation, and how far back it goes no one knows. That verse speaks of the dawn of creation and it is impossible for us to tell how far back it is. Neither science nor Scripture answers us. Science suggests it was millions of years ago, and Scripture is quite ready to accommodate that. However long ago it was, there was a time of beginning. That first beginning is the beginning of creation.

In the first verse of the Gospel of John, there is another "beginning": "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That beginning goes back before creation. That is the unbeginning beginning, the beginning that is eternal. That simply means the starting point, the farthest point backward that we can go. We humans have to start somewhere in our thinking. We are finite creatures and we have to start with A in order, eventually, to arrive at Z, and it is that A which John is describing in his gospel. Before there was anything at all there was the Word. That Word was a Person and he was with God, and he was God.

But now, in this letter, there is still a third beginning, "that which was from the beginning." Here John does not mean either the time of creation or the unbeginning beginning, the timeless beginning. He is referring to a definite time here. Note a few places where he uses this phrase and you will see what he means by it. In chapter 2, verse 7, he says, "Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment which you had from the beginning." In verse 14 he says, "I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning." In verse 24 he says, "Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you will abide in the Son and in the Father." Chapter 3, verse 11: "For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another" (italics mine throughout).

It is difficult to locate this beginning, is it not? It seems to shift around from one time to another. It is what we might call the "contemporary beginning," or the "existential beginning"--the beginning I am experiencing right now. John is really referring to the continuous experience of the Christian life, which is contemporary all the time, new and fresh and vital, a continuous "beginning." It has been available for all time but you only began it when you came to know Jesus Christ. The writers of the New Testament began it when they came to know him, and John began it when he first knew him. It thus relates to him who is from the beginning. It is a timeless beginning that is right now, an eternal now.

Although it may be difficult to grasp the concept, it is important, for John warns all through this letter that we must cling only to that which is "from the beginning." If someone comes to you with something new, he says do not believe it. The cults today say, "Look, we have something different, something that has come along much later in history than the Bible. We have an additional revelation to give you." Say to them, "Keep it. I want that which is from the beginning."

Shared Life

Now John says, this one who was from the beginning is a Person and he has been seen and heard and handled. In other words, Christian faith rests upon great facts, the acts of a human being in history. Our Christian faith does not rest simply on ideas, or creedal statements. That is why becoming a Christian is not simply a matter of joining a church or believing a certain creed or signing a doctrinal statement. That has nothing to do with becoming a Christian. John points out that becoming a Christian is to be related to a Person.

All of us are related to someone. We live in families, God delights to "setteth the solitary in families" (Ps. 68:6, KJV). Children are related to their parents and parents to their children. Why? Because they share the same life. In the same way a Christian is one who shares the life of God by relationship to a Person, the only Person who has that life, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. At the close of this letter John tells us, "He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son of God has not life" (5:12). It is that simple. No matter how religious you may be, you do not have life if you do not have the Son: that is, you are not a true Christian.

That which was from the beginning, John says, is a real Person. "We looked at him, we heard him, we touched him, he actually appeared in history. He is a historical being. We knew him, fellowshiped with him, lived with him, ate with him, slept with him, heard his words, and have never forgotten them." This is the point to which all objections to Christianity are ultimately directed. The forces which seek to overthrow Christian faith today try to undermine our confidence in the facts of Scripture, these great historical truths about a Person who appeared in time. That is why it is not at all unimportant that we should believe the story as it is recorded in the Gospels. We must see these as facts, the acts of God in history. That is where John begins; he tells us what he himself experienced. We touched him, he says, we felt his warm, human flesh, we looked into his human eyes, we felt the beating of his human heart. And yet, as we did, we became aware that we were listening to the heartbeat of God. In some amazing way we were looking into the eyes of God and feeling the heartbeat of God and coming into contact with the life of God. He took that life and laid it down so that we might have it. He gave it to us through the cross, and that life is what makes us part of the family.

Now he goes on to say, in verse 2, that this life was made manifest, made visible. Twice he says it. What does he mean by it? He means that this eternal life was visible in the relationship of the Father and the Son. Jesus did not come to show us God, but man related to God. As you look at the life of Jesus you will see this relationship, this lost secret of humanity, by which man is intended to live--a continual dependence upon the life of the Father. Look at the earthly life of Jesus and this is exactly what you see. He keeps saying, "It is not I who accomplishes these works, it is the Father who dwells in me." He is continually reminding people that he says only what the Father is saying through him. The words are not his words; he simply looks to God and trusts God to be working through him, leading him to think the thoughts and to say the things God wants him to say. In doing this he expresses exactly the mind of God. It is that life that John is talking about, a new way of living, a new way of reacting to situations in dependence upon God.

A Christian man once came up to me at a conference where I was speaking and said, "I've been a professional baseball player all my life. I learned early that in order to be a success I had to have self-confidence. I became one of the top players in my league, and I did it by being self-confident. Now you tell me that this is not the way, that I'm not to have confidence in myself but to have confidence in God in me. How do I do this?"

I replied, "It's very simple. You must renounce your confidence in yourself and recognize that God, working through you, can do far more than you could ever do. When you are confident in yourself, all that you accomplish is what you can do. But when God is at work in you, you not only accomplish what you can do but far more that you can't see. You change lives. People are affected permanently and you leave an impression behind that is not forgotten."

Something in Common

He said, "I think I see what you mean, but I have a great deal of difficulty with this."

I told him, "I know; this is one of the hardest things to learn because it is a wholly different way of life than the way we were brought up. But it is the way that was manifest in the Lord Jesus himself. He lived this way. The explanation of that one unforgettable life is that he demonstrated what it means to walk in continual dependence upon a God who dwelt within him."

Then John says that this life will result in two wonderful things: First, fellowship, the most beautiful thing about family life.

--that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us-- (1:3a).

What is fellowship? In the Navy we used to say it was two fellows on the same ship, and that is partly true. They do have something in common--the same ship. Essentially this word means "to have things in common." When you have something in common with another you can have fellowship with him. If you have nothing in common, you have no fellowship. We all have things in common--human life, American citizenship, many other matters. But John is talking about that unique fellowship which is the possession only of those who share life in Jesus Christ, who have this different kind of life, this new relationship that makes them one. The basis for the appeal of Scripture to live together in tenderness and love toward one another is not that we are inherently wonderful people, or remarkable personalities, or that we are naturally gracious, kind, loving, and tender all the time. For at times we are grouchy, scratchy, and irritating to others. But we are still to love one another. That is his point. Why? Because we share the Lord Jesus, his life, and, therefore, we have fellowship with one another.

Ah, but that is not all, and it cannot be all. The horizontal relationship depends upon a vertical one. He goes on, "and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ" (1:3b). We shall discover, as we go on as Christians, that the horizontal relationship is directly related to the vertical one. If the vertical is not right, the horizontal one will be wrong, and if it is wrong it is because something is wrong between us and the Father. If we want to straighten out the horizontal relationship, that of getting along with our fellow Christians and fellow men, we must be sure that the vertical connection is straight. Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Communion with Christ

Now fellowship here means exactly the same thing it means elsewhere. It means having things in common. Here we come to the most remarkable thing about Christian life, communion, or fellowship with Christ. It takes two English words--partnership and friendship--to bring out what this really means. There is, first of all, a partnership, a sharing of mutual interests, mutual resources, mutual labor. God and I, working together, are a partnership. All that I have is placed at his disposal. Well, what do I have? I have me--my mind, my body. True, these are gifts of God, but they are put at my disposal to do with as I please. That is what I have. And now I put them at his disposal. When I do, I discover something most remarkable. Everything that he is, is put at my disposal. Is that not marvelous? The greatness of God, the wisdom, the power, the glory of his might: all is made available to me, when I make myself available to him. This is the great secret of fellowship.

This means that he makes available to me that which I desperately lack--wisdom and power, the ability to do. There are things I know I want to do, things I would like to do because it is what he wants. But I can only do them as I make myself available to him, depending upon him to me. Then I discover that I can do what I want to do, as Paul says: "I can do all things in him who strengthens me" (Phil. 4:13).

But there is also friendship. Friendship and partnership together spell fellowship. Have you ever thought of this, that God desires you to be his friend? What do you do with a friend? You tell him secrets. That is what friends are for. You tell a friend intimate things, secrets. You are to tell your secrets to God (See 1 John 1:9). And God wants to tell us secrets. Jesus said to his disciples, "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). He said this in a context in which he was attempting to impart to them the secrets of life. Now God will do this--he wants to do it. This is what that wonder word fellowship means. But it will be as you are able to bear these secrets. As you grow along with him you will discover that your eyes are continually being opened to things you never saw before. God will tell you secrets about yourself, about life, about others around you, about everything, imparting these to you because that is part of fellowship. That is what we are called to. The fellowship is based upon the relationship. You cannot have the fellowship until you first come to Christ and receive him.

When you have the Son you are related to the Father, and when you are related to him, you can have fellowship with him. When you have fellowship, you also have the third thing that John mentions: joy. Perhaps it will be more helpful for us to understand what John means if we use the word excitement--"that your excitement may be complete." Joy is a kind of quiet inner excitement which results when we really experience the fellowship John is writing about.

When we discover that God is actually using us, it is the most exciting experience possible to men. I have seen come through from his side, making himself available to young people become so excited over this that they literally jump up and down. A dear girl I know cannot relate what the Lord does without bouncing as she tells it. I have seen men, familiar with the world of high finance, get so excited over the fact that God was using them in some simple way that they trembled as they told about it. I have known women who have discovered how exciting it is to have God at work in their neighborhood, using their home, their kitchen, and their coffee pot, that they have not been able to sleep at night. John is talking about life, as life was intended to believed, filled with joy. Oh yes, with many pressures! Do not make the mistake of thinking that the only way to have joy is to be free from pressures or problems. No, you will have all of these, but along with them that wonderful feeling down inside that God is at work, and he is at work in you. God is using you to do his eternal work.

Chapter Two

God Is Light

1 John 1:5

This life which Christians share, John goes on to say, is also a message. We know how a man's life can become a single message. The life of Adolf Hitler, for instance, has become a message to the world of how pride, pursued to the full, opens the door to demonic powers, and terrible, frightening things can follow. But there are other kinds of messages men can communicate by their lives. A few years ago, I read the biography of that amazing American, George Washington Carver, the dedicated black scientist who, though born into slavery, became one of the greatest scientists this nation has ever produced and whose discoveries have blessed the whole world. The message of his life is that true humility is the open door to learning. It is exactly the opposite of the message of Hitler.

The whole life of Jesus Christ is also a message given to us here in one verse:

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).

That is the message of the life of Jesus. That is what he came to tell us, and what he imparts to us as we learn to know him. It is put both positively and negatively: "God is light and in him is no darkness at all." It is easy to see how that message was incorporated and fulfilled in the life of Jesus. John opens his Gospel with the words, "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out" (John 1:4, 5, TEV). That is the glory of this life. Our Lord himself said, "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). There it is again, a life that is light. Again, he said, "This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19).

What, exactly does this message mean, "God is light"? Obviously the apostle John expects us to think about this a bit, for he says this is the sum, this is the meaning, of all that Jesus came to do and to be, whether we considering his life lived in history, or the life he will in us right now. It will all come out here, "God is light and in him is no darkness at all" (1:15). Notice something else. John does not say, "Light is God." It is, "God is light." You cannot reverse that. If it were, "Light is God," then, of course, the Indians who greet the rising sun with outstretched arms and burn incense to it are truer worshipers of God than we. No, it does not say "Light is God," but "God is light."

All about Light

That means that what light is, on a physical plane, God is on every level of human experience. If you want to understand the character of God, then observe what light. What light does, God does. What light accomplishes, God can accomplish in your life. Well, then, what does light do? In this enlightened twentieth century we feel we have learned a great deal about light, much more than men knew fifty or a hundred years ago. We have analyzed it, broken it down into its spectrum; we can take fractions of it and use them for various purposes. We have timed it, measured its speed; we know that known in the universe. We have managed to produce x-rays and laser beams which do amazing things. But after all this we have really learned nothing essentially new about light. That is the humiliating thing about it. The great functions of light are universally known and have been known ever since the beginning of history. In the earliest dawn of humanity men experienced what light could do as fully as modern men do today.

The function of light, basically, is threefold. First, the most characteristic thing about light, and probably the first discoverable fact about light, is that light reveals. A number of years ago, I visited the Grand Canyon for the first time. I was driving alone from Texas to Southern California and on the way I picked up two high school boys who were hitchhiking. On the spur of the moment the three of us decided to leave highway 66 and drive up to see the Grand Canyon. It was about ten-thirty at night when we made our decision, and we knew we would have to spend the night somewhere. Since we had sleeping bags with us, we decided to drive up inside the park, find a place to sleep, and see the Canyon in the morning. We arrived in the park long after midnight and not knowing where the Canyon was, we drove on until we found a wide spot in the road and pulled over. Taking out our sleeping bags we walked a few feet into the trees and went to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, the sun was high. To my astonishment I found that I had been sleeping within arm's length of the edge of the Canyon. If I had rolled over in my sleep, I would have fallen off the edge of a 500-foot precipice. In the darkness, we had not seen it but the light made it clear. We were grateful that we had not tried to go further from the car that night.

Life in Focus

The first function of light, then, is to enable us to see things that have been there all the time. That is exactly what John means; God reveals reality. God, through Christ, opens the eyes of the heart and brings life into focus so that we see clearly, without distortion. It does not all happen in one amazing transformation. Often, it is a gradual process, for we would not be able to take the full revelation all at once. But God's purpose in entering human hearts is to show us reality. Light reveals, and so does God. The enigmas of life will gradually unfold, the great mysteries will become clear, illusions will be seen for what they are--deceiving phantasmas that disappear the light shines upon them.

Entering college for the first time, I was not at all sure about what I was getting into. I displayed an outward appearance of confidence and the ability to handle anything, but within I had a deep sense of uncertainty. I felt as though I were trying to play a game without knowing the rules, but trying to guess them as I went along. It was rough. I was baffled, as all young people are baffled, by the great questions of life. What am I here for? What is it really all about? What is worthwhile about life, and how do you tell? How do you fit death into this whole picture? The more I learned about life the more baffled I became, until I met Jesus Christ and began understand the message of his life, the message in his Word. Bit by bit things began to come clear. First came the answers to some of the greater issues, like what life is all about, and what happens after death. Then details began to filter through the fog and little by little matters became much clearer. Much remains, but I am no longer confused. The road ahead is clear.

Out of my darkness one fact became increasingly clearer to me. A great mystery that impinged upon every other question of my life was resolved. I discovered that it was the key to many things. It was the fact that the solution to most of my troubles lay within me. The problems were not outside of me, as I once thought; I was the big problem. As I began to see that, I saw what it was in me that was creating the problems. Little by little I began to understand myself. The mystery of self was revealed by the light as it shone upon me from the word of the only One who knows what is in man. I began, then, to see the answers to the problems of life God is light and light reveals.

Measuring Stick

But that is not light's only quality. It also measures. Did you ever watch a man pick up a stick and sight along it? What is he doing? He is trying to see whether it is crooked. What reveals that? A beam of light. Light is straight and anything that does not correspond to it is crooked. Surveyors use light to measure distances and angles, to see whether they are up or down, high or low, right or left. They have an instrument with a small telescope on it which uses light as a measurement. Also, in the vast, illimitable reaches of space today the only adequate measuring stick is light-years, the distance measured by the speed of light.

That is what light does, and that is what God does. God is a measuring stick, a point of reference. You can more use God to measure everything else. In economic life, to political life, social life, scientific life, psychological life, revealed whatever it may be, we are confronted with mysteries and puzzles wherever we turn. As men seek to ferret out the what solutions to these puzzles they come up with many proposed solutions. Some are contradictory, some are supplementary to each other, some are absurd, some are stupid, some are very appealing and practical. Every one of us, facing this welter of advice, is constantly asking, how do I know which one is right? How do I know who has the real answers? Where do I get a measuring stick that can be applied to these voices I hear? That is where God comes in.

I read recently a very interesting book on the great economic philosophers of the past. These men have analyzed the social and economic structures of life and have tried to explain what happens to the market to make it rise and fall so that men go broke or become rich overnight. It discusses the theories of men like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Keynes, and others. It is an interesting book because it reveals that no one knows the full answers. All the guesses have fallen short; no one can really put his finger on the secret of economic management in society. The reason is that none of the thinkers sees man as God sees him. None of them sees man as he really is, and therefore they miss the point. But God sees man according to the truth, according to the light. All the conflicting voices we hear today can be sorted out and measured by his revelation of what man is.

Now that is very practical. Is your marriage working out? Do you get all kinds of advice on how to make it work? Well, the light that shines from God's Word about marriage is the full truth about what makes marriages work. If you measure the advice you get by God's Word, you can tell what to believe. It is the only measure there is when you fall in love with another woman or another man, and your own home looks dull and hopeless, and you are drawn by the temptation to forget it all and run off with the other person and start all over again. It all looks so lusciously attractive. But then you measure it against God's Word and there you learn the unpleasant truth--which may be quite unpalatable to you at the moment--that your dream will not work: it will only increase your misery, and hurt and destroy everyone involved. Because you see that and have learned to trust the light a bit, you say, "All right, even though I want to do this I won't." Later on the blindness passes and you are so grateful, so eternally thankful, that God's light stopped you from going on into darkness. "The light shines in the darkness," John says, "and the darkness has never put it out" (John 1:5, TEV).

Electric Invitation

Light not only reveals and measures, but light energizes as well. That is the most dramatic quality about light. It imparts life, it activates and quickens. Some years ago I ran across a most eloquent description in one of the sermons of Phillips Brooks along this line. He says,

When the sun rose this morning it found the world in darkness, torpid and heavy and asleep, with powers all wrapped up in sluggishness; with life that was hardly better or more alive than death. The sun found this great sleeping world and woke it. It bade it to be itself. It quickened every slow and sluggish faculty. It called to the dull streams and said, "Be quick"; to the dull birds and bade them sing; to the dull fields and made them grow; to dull men and bade them think and talk and work. It flashed electric invitation to the whole mass of sleeping power which really was the world and summoned it to action. It did not make the world. It did not start another set of processes unlike those which had been sluggishly moving in the darkness. It poured strength into the essential processes which belonged to the very nature of the earth. It glorified, intensified, fulfilled the earth.

That is what God does. God is light and God intensifies, fulfills, and glorifies our essential humanity. He does not destroy it. He takes it and leads it on through the darkness into an ever-growing experience of life and vitality and productivity.

Right at this point comes the often unspoken question, "All right, I grant you this happens to a few, but why only to a few? What's the matter with the rest of the Christians? Why is it that all Christians are not this way? Why are they not alert and informed, stable and dependable, alive and attractive? Why is it that the Christians I meet are so untrustworthy, so critical, so harsh, repelling, and negative? If God is light and he can do this, why does it seem to happen to only a few?"

These are the questions the world is asking, are they not? And that is exactly the question John takes up next. He goes on to point out three reasons why the light does not help, even though it is shining. There are three conditions that are like umbrellas that we Christians erect to shut out the healing, cleansing, glorifying, fulfilling light. God is light and he does reveal truth; he does measure life and give us a reference point by which the false can be separated from the true. Best of all, he fulfills, he glorifies, he energizes, he vitalizes. But he does so only as we learn to take down the umbrellas that hide the light from us.

Chapter Three

The Man Who Ignores Light

1 John 1:3-7

Why is it that some Christians seem to be transformed by contact with Jesus Christ--their lives are perceptibly different--but others are not? Some Christians, even Christians of long standing, seem still to be very much conformed to the world around them, even deformed in their views and outlooks. Yet all of them stoutly assert that they are Christians, that they, too, have been born again by faith in Jesus Christ. It is not strange that the world asks, what is wrong?

The secret, John says, is fellowship, that is, experiencing Christ. Relationship is accepting Christ; fellowship is experiencing him. You can never have fellowship until you have established relationship, but you can certainly have relationship without fellowship. Relationship puts us into the family of God, but fellowship permits the life of the family to shine out through us. That is what marks the difference between Christians. Relationship is to be "in the Lord" but fellowship is to "be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might" (Eph. 6:10, KJV), as Paul so beautifully expresses it in his letter to the Ephesians.

Relationship means that all God has is potentially yours, but fellowship means you are actually drawing upon his resources. Relationship is you possessing God; fellowship is God possessing you. Fellowship, then, is the key to vital Christianity.

John sees three ways by which Christians miss out on fellowship. In the first chapter we will see that he uses the phrase, "if we say," three times: verse 6, "If we say we have fellowship"; verse 8, "If we say we have no sin"; and verse 10, "If we say we have not sinned." Three times a profession is indicated, but the condition or action that follows belies the profession. In this first instance, John says,

If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:6, 7).

What is the problem here? This is a very common condition. Here is a Christian, John says, who has established a relationship with God, he has come into the family of God by faith in Christ. Perhaps that relationship has actually been established for years. The man has been a Christian a long time, and he says that he has fellowship with God. That means he claims to be experiencing the full flow of the life in the Spirit, the life of God. He claims that the life of Jesus Christ is his in experience as well as in potential. But, John says, there is no sign of it in his life. He lies. He does not live in accord with his claim. He does not live according to the truth. His life is harsh, perhaps, and loveless; critical and demanding of others. Or perhaps it is intemperate, frivolous and flippant, shallow and superficial. Or perhaps it is gossipy and sharp-tongued, or resentful and filled with bitterness.

A Great Misunderstanding

Well, what is wrong? Nothing is wrong with the relationship. It does no good to talk to this person about becoming a Christian: he is a Christian. He understands what it means to know Jesus Christ. Well, what is wrong? John analyzes it: such a person, he says, is "walking in darkness." Do we not greatly misunderstand this phrase? It is often thought to refer to having fallen into sin, what was once called "a backslidden condition." It is the opposite, of course, of walking in the light. Do we not unconsciously think of walking in the light as being perfect, as having everything right? If we are behaving as we ought to as Christians, that is walking in the light. The opposite of that would be walking in darkness, that is, not behaving the way we ought. But to view this phrase that way is to confuse cause with results. The fact is, we sin because we are walking in darkness! Walking in darkness is not an equivalent term to sinning. We are sinning because we walk in darkness. That is the problem.

Well, then, what is darkness? We must answer that first on the physical level. How would you go about getting a room dark that is filled with light? Would you have to somehow scoop out the light and shovel in darkness? Of course not, you need only to turn off the light. Darkness is simply the absence of light. Wherever there is no light there is darkness. That is precisely what John means here. To walk in darkness means to walk as though there were no God, for God is light. It is to be a practical atheist--not an actual one, of course. We believe there is a God, we know he is there, but we live as though he did not exist. We do not expose ourselves to him. That is walking in darkness.

This is what John is describing here. It is possible to be a Christian and yet walk in darkness by turning God off. When you turn off the light the darkness comes flooding in, instantly. As I suggested, this is not a rare condition at all. John starts with this problem because it is one of the most widespread and commonplace of problems. It is evident on every side. You can miss the benefits of God's presence in your heart and life by ignoring the light.

How do you do this? I wish to be very practical about this. Sometimes these biblical terms are so familiar to us they fall upon our ears without meaning. Therefore, it is sometimes very helpful to put them in other ways. How, then, do people actually turn off the light and walk in darkness?

Lights Off

Some people stop attending church. That is one way. The Word of God, if it is proclaimed from a pulpit, is a channel of God's light. The Word itself is light. It penetrates and searches, it seeks out our inner life and exposes it to our view. If we stop coming to church we escape the light that way. We are no longer made uncomfortable by the Word. We discover that if we stay away we do not experience that pricking of our conscience which the light awakens. The writer of Hebrews warns of a tendency to do this as we draw near the close of the age. He says, "Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some" (Heb. 10:24, 25, emphasis added). The delusions of the age are such that they tend to make us want to stay away from the light. It is much more comfortable to sit around in the old slippers of the flesh and enjoy oneself at home. That is one way to turn off the light.

Another way is to stop reading the Scriptures. There are many who do this. An amazing number of Christians have simply turned off the light by ceasing to read the Scriptures. They seldom open the Bible. They only hear a verse now and then, and are content with what they get in church or Sunday school, but they seldom open it for themselves. Underneath all the excuses that are given for this--no time, lots of pressures, and so on--there is really a desire to escape the light. The Word is light, but we want to walk in darkness. As Mark Twain put it, "It isn't the parts of Scripture that I don't understand that bother me, it's the parts I do."

There are other, more subtle ways to walk in darkness; for example, never take a long look at yourself. Never examine yourself. Nod your head at the right places when the sermon is being expounded, but never apply it or ask questions of yourself about what is being said. This is an almost certain way of walking in darkness, and one of the most common evasions of our day. I would suggest to you that perhaps the greatest cause of weakness among evangelical Christians is that we seldom stop to examine ourselves. We never ask ourselves searching and penetrating questions as to where we are in the Christian life.

The apostle Paul says, "Examine yourselves, whether you be in the faith"! He urges this kind of activity upon us. He says, in effect, do not go on taking it for granted that because you are hearing the truth, you are obeying it. Ask yourself, "Where am I?" John says, "Test the spirits whether they be of God." Examine what you are listening to and how you are thinking, and lay it alongside the Scriptures. Put to yourself life's most basic question: Where am I? Do it periodically and frequently. What kind of Christian am I? Am I better than I was six months ago? Am I easier to live with? Am I a more gracious, compassionate, outgoing kind of person than I was a year ago? That is walking in the light, and to avoid it is to walk in darkness.

There is yet another way. You can walk in darkness by comparing yourself with other Christians. Again, this is a very common way. You can find a favorite person, someone who is obviously lower on the scale than you are, and what a comfort they are! Any time you find yourself getting uneasy about your own spiritual condition, remind yourself of him--or her. "At least I'm better than him." If you keep this up you can go on for years walking in darkness without the light ever once shining on you.

Another variety of the same thing is to blame others. Be sure to find an excuse for your wrong behavior in what others have done to you. Blame the church. Blame the Sunday school. Blame the teachers. Blame your father or mother. Blame your children. Blame the boss. Blame the Internal Revenue Service. But never blame yourself! This is another sure way to walk in darkness.

A variant way is never admit that anything is wrong in your life. Always appear to be what you want to be when you are out among others. At home, of course, because of the strain of this kind of living, there must be times when you relax and are yourself. Try to be alone when that happens. But otherwise, keep up appearances. This is a way to walk in darkness.

Spiritual Make-up

Put on what I call "moral cosmetics." Did you ever see a woman making up her face? She examines it first, and then she applies a bit of color here and a bit there, a touch of blue here and brown there, patting it and arranging it to look the way she wants it to look. This is a rather harmless matter when it occurs only at the physical level, for the physical is somewhat remote from us--but the closer we get to the real us the more deadly this kind of a practice becomes. We can do it not only on the physical level, but on the soulish and spiritual level as well. We make ourselves up when we go out among others in the kind of image we want them to see.

That practice is absolutely guaranteed to abruptly halt all Christian growth. If you appear to be mature when you are not, then you cannot ever be seen as needing anything. So, when you are out with other Christians it must always appear that you already have everything. You cannot listen, you cannot really seek for anything yourself, you cannot admit any need. If you are already fully grown, of course, you cannot appear to need any food, and so you do not grow. You cannot grow, and you never will grow. This is why the Lord Jesus said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled" (Matt. 5:6, KJV).

Is it not very instructive that the first miracle of judgment in the New Testament occurred shortly after the Day of Pentecost when Ananias and Sapphira were judged for pretending to be what they were not, pretending to have a holiness that they did not actually possess? The Holy Spirit is trying to arrest our attention by this account, to show the deadliness of pretense. It is a most dramatic scene, when these two fall dead. Furthermore, this kind of pretense makes it impossible for you ever to help a younger Christian, even the younger Christians in your own home. They are helped by seeing you overcome the problems of life by the reaction of faith. If you do not admit there are problems, if you never talk about them or never appear to have them, then your image to your children is simply one of achieved perfection, and it is the most discouraging thing they can ever run into.

One day a woman took me aside and for two and a half hours poured a tragic tale into my ear. As a young Christian she admired another Christian woman. This woman appeared to her to be the acme of Christian perfection. She longed to be like her, but she confessed that whenever she was with her she came away totally depressed. She found the standard apparently set before her was impossible to achieve in her immature Christian relationship. But one day she discovered a terribly serious flaw in that other person--who immediately tried to cover it up. All the delusions of years came crashing down around this young woman's head. She realized that the other woman had been pretending all the time. It resulted in a terrible crisis in her experience. She was overwhelmed with feelings of bitterness and resentment, and cried out to me. "Oh, if she had just admitted some need, what a help it would have been to me!"

One of the most serious problems among Christians stems from never admitting that anything is wrong, or that we have problems, or that there are times when our faith is tested. We never tell anyone about these. Therefore, we walk in darkness. Remember, darkness is the absence of light. To walk in the light is to have everything open, exposed to God, or to anyone else who is interested. But to walk in darkness is to talk about love and joy and power, but to live a lie. It is fellowship, the sharing of the life of Christ, from which strength comes. To ignore light is to choose weakness.

Now what is the answer? John says, "Walk in the light" (1:7). That does not mean to behave perfectly, but to examine ourselves; to be willing to look at ourselves, listen seriously to what others say about us and ask ourselves how much truth there is in it, and not immediately to grow defensive. If we take down our fences and facades and open up to others, tell them what we are going through and encourage them to open up to us, admitting faults--this is walking in the light. As James puts it, "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another" (James 5:16, KJV). If we share these and ask for prayer about them, John says, "We have fellowship with one another" (1:7), you and Christ. Immediately you have fellowship. That is the important thing, is it not? You immediately discover that when you are willing to look, to listen, and to examine, that the light is shining on you. If you walk in the light it does not matter what your actual condition is; immediately you will have fellowship with the Son of God.

But not only that, our fellowship is also with one another. Fellowship with other humans will surely follow. In other words, you become approachable, sympathetic, and uncritical. You lose your blaming, demanding, critical spirit. You give up your perfectionism, your demand that everyone else measure up. You become human, and oh, so much easier to live with.

Cause of Depression

That is not all, however. There is more, and it goes much deeper. Listen to this "Éand the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1:7). Why does he put that thought in there? Is it not extraneous? Is that not introducing some other idea? We have been talking about fellowship and now suddenly he talks about cleansing. Well, of course, it is not out of place. Nothing in God's Word is out of place. This belongs right here because the inevitable accompaniment of evading light is guilt. You cannot walk in darkness without being guilty, feeling guilty. Guilt is the underlying cause of Christian depression. It is the thing that creates that somber, wet-blanket approach so many Christians demonstrate. They are suffering from suppressed guilt and trying to make up for it in a rigid, demanding code to punish themselves for not being what they know they ought to be. Walking in darkness also results in actual physical afflictions at times, such as insomnia, obesity, nervous habits, and even asthma and ulcers, aphasia, and other afflictions.

To walk in the light means to hide nothing. You do not defend yourself from the light of God nor in any way try to appear to be something you are not. It means to come instantly, without defensiveness, to the light and deal with it before God. If you see something wrong, say so. You are not going to lose face. You are not going to lose status. The amazing thing is that your friends will still love you. In fact, they love you more when you begin to admit there are things wrong in your life. You will discover that you are far more approachable, far more human. Your family begins to be comfortable around you instead of being uncomfortable. And there comes the sweet relief of the cleansing grace of God that always accompanies walking in the light. It is almost automatic. If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ is continuously cleansing us from all sin. It is the present tense there; it is done instantly, continuously, all the time.

You could walk through a great, dark cloud of soot, and if it were dark enough and thick enough, you would come out completely covered with black--face, hands, everything--except for two spots that would be clear: your eyeballs. Why? Because a continuous cleansing action goes on all the time, keeping the eyes clear. And this is the provision God has made in Christ. If we walk in the light, if we do not try to deceive ourselves, pretending we are something we are not, the blood of Jesus Christ is continuously cleansing us so that the problems of the immediate past, as well as the distant past, are taken care of in the cleansing, forgiving grace accomplished in the death of Jesus Christ, the blood of Christ outpoured for us.

Many have told me that they had been Christians for years, but had seldom experienced fellowship because they had been walking in darkness. But I also have a long list of those who have come to me and said what a joy, what a sheer, dramatic relief it has been to get rid of all this posturing, this pretending, and admit that they have problems. When they did this, they were open to have people pray for them even though they had been Christians for years, and to feel the burden of pretense roll away. It is a glorious freedom, the cleansing grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Chapter Four

The Man Who Denies Sin

1 John 1:8, 9

We have just looked at one way of avoiding light. But there is a second obstacle which can keep us from walking in the light and thus cause us to miss out on fellowship. It is given in verses 8 and 9 of chapter 1.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

It is necessary to note first the difference between the word "sin" and "sins." In verse 8 it is singular: "If we say we have no sin"; in verse 9 it is plural: "If we confess our sins." This marks a very important distinction between the root, which is "sin," singular, and the fruit, which is "sins," plural. Sin is that in man which makes him want to play God on every occasion. We know how this is: we want the world to revolve around us, that we may always be the center of things. That self-centeredness is sin. It goes by other names as well: pride, selfishness, or independence. That is the root, the twist in human nature which makes us commit sins.

Sins, therefore, are those specific forms which this inward bent makes us take. There are many kinds of sins, but they all stem from one root, sin. John says if we say we have no sin, that is, no capacity to commit sins, if we deny the very possibility of sins, then we deceive ourselves. Obviously, this case is worse than the previous one. In the first instance, John says, "if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth" (1:6). There, we are trying to deceive others and to some degree we often succeed. But if we say we have no ability to sin at all we are only deceiving ourselves. Others are quite aware that we are lying to, and deceiving, ourselves. They are not fooled. The man who ignores the light deceives others but seldom himself. He knows that he is not living as he ought; he knows he is ignoring light. But this one deceives himself, and that is always pathetic. He actually believes that he can no longer sin, that there is no longer any possibility of evil in him.

You ask, does this really happen? Are there people so deluded that they have come to the place where they really think they cannot sin? Unfortunately we must reply yes, it often happens. John would not have brought this up if it did not happen. It happened in his day and it happens in our day, and for several reasons. But whenever it happens, the one who makes this claim immediately loses that glorious fellowship which makes Christianity so vital and unforgettable. He loses his power, his influence, his vitality, and his effectiveness as a Christian. His life becomes lusterless, dull, and deadening.

Victim of False Teaching

Now how does this happen? There are primarily three ways in which this occurs. First, a Christian can become the victim of one of the cults which deny the reality of sin, saying that sin is but "an error of mortal mind." Sin, they say, has no real existence; it is a mere figment of the imagination, and all that is necessary to deal with sin is to correct one's thinking. This widespread teaching is represented by groups such as Christian Science, the Unity School of Christianity, and Religious Science. Also, it is prominent in non-Christian religions such as Theosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism. These all teach that sin does not really exist; it is merely in the mind. Truth exists and good exists, but sin does not have objective reality.

Unfortunately, many who are really Christians have trying to deceive others and to some degree we often fallen into this trap and believe that to correct the problem of sin merely calls for an adjustment in their thinking. But John says, if you believe that the truth is not in you, there is no light in you, for light is truth and truth is light. The truth as it is revealed in Jesus says something quite different. According to the word of the Lord, both directly from his own lips and through the apostles that followed, the truth is that sin is a very objective reality. It does exist; it is always a present possibility. It finds its original expression in the great hosts of satanically controlled beings who are at work in the world, influencing and controlling the thinking of men. Sin is personified in the person of our adversary, the devil, but it exists as a very powerful and persuasive factor in life. To treat it as though it is not there is to practice self-deception and to become the victim of the saddest of delusions.

There is nothing more pathetic than the person who denies the reality of sin. In this regard, I always remember the story of a young woman who was attending a meeting with older women. They were discussing the effects of prenatal influence upon a child, and some gave rather strange accounts. One said that when she was carrying her baby she saw a red fire engine, and the baby was born with a red blotch on its forehead. This young woman said, "I don't believe all this. My mother told me that before I was born she dropped a whole pile of phonograph records and broke every one, but it didn't affect me, affect me, affect me, affect me." So those who make this claim of being free from the universal taint of sin are constantly saying by their very lives that it did affect them, as it affects all.

The Root Removed

Now that is the first way of denying sin; those who succumb to the false teaching of the cults. Then there are those Christians--and very devout Christians, for the most part--who have come to believe that the root of sin with which they were born has been somehow eradicated. By the activity of the Holy Spirit in the outworking of their salvation it has been completely torn out, lifted out, and they are freed from the root of sin. There are a considerable number of Christians who follow this teaching today. They group themselves in denominations that usually bear the name "holiness." They interpret sanctification as a digging out and eradicating of the root of sin. Often they even base this idea upon a verse in 1 John. Many of them quote 1 John 3:9, "No one born of God commits sin; for God's nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God." At first glance this verse does look like a confirmation of that view. But it is clear from the Greek that John is referring to habitual sin in that verse. A Christian cannot persist, on a continuous basis, in sin, because he is born of God. He cannot sin without a sense of grief so powerful that ultimately, despite his struggles, he will be brought to repentance.

Quite a number of years ago, in Pasadena, I went into a certain barbershop for a haircut. I went because I had heard that the barber was a Christian. After I sat down in the barber chair, he began his work. It was not long before I discovered that he was indeed Christian, but he was a member of a holiness group. He personally believed that he had come to the place where he did not any longer have the possibility of sin. Unfortunately for him, I was that most knowledgeable of creatures, a seminary student in his second year, and we got into a argument that waxed hotter and hotter as it went along. Finally he became so perturbed over our discussion that he began yelling and shouting at me and waving his fist in front of me, until another customer who was waiting got up in disgust and walked out. I felt that was quite an adequate commentary on the theology of the barber, for he was himself demonstrating the folly of his position.

Here again, those who do this are self-deceived. They walk in darkness and therefore they are without fellowship, for the key to fellowship with Christ is to walk in the light. If you have reached the place where you say there is nothing for the light to reveal any more, all sin is taken away, there is nothing to look at any more, then, of course, you are deceiving yourself and you walk in darkness--and it always results in loss of fellowship.

But there is still a third way of denying sin, even more subtle, but perhaps more widespread, that occurs among the best instructed Christians: those who have learned, that there is a possibility of being free from sin by walking in the Spirit. They have fully grasped the implications of the great verse in Galatians that says, "Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh" (Gal. 5:16, KJV). They are aware of the mighty possibilities for freedom from the control and power of sin, and they enter into this with all their hearts. They give themselves diligently to understanding how to walk in the Spirit in every circumstance until they believe that they have so mastered the process of being free from sin that they invariably fulfill it: therefore, they do not, and even cannot, sin.

Theoretically Possible

It seems a perfectly logical position to take, does it not? Theoretically it is possible, for any given period of time, to so walk in the Spirit that we are free from sin, we do not sin. This is the whole purpose of salvation in its present tense. When we manifest the life of the Spirit, we do not sin. This is true. But the remarkable thing is that as you read the pages of the New Testament you discover that no New Testament Christian ever makes a claim to sinless perfection. The only one who could say, and did say, that he was without sin was the Lord Jesus himself. All others remind us that though we must face constantly the challenge of walking without sin, nevertheless, the subtlety of the flesh, the cleverness of the wiles of the devil, the ease by which we can deceive ourselves and be deceived, is so prevalent and powerful that there will be times when we succumb, times when we fail.

As Paul warns his readers, "Let any one who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall" (1 Cor. 10:12). This is why the Christian is always exhorted to walk in fear and trembling. When we think we have come to the place where we have mastered the processes of walking in the Spirit, then we need to think again. We have not yet learned it all. Even the apostle Paul can say of himself at the close of his ministry that he regards himself as the chief of sinners--not because he sees sin abounding in his life, but because, as his conscience is sensitized, his awareness of transgression multiplies. He is fully aware of the ease with which he can fall into an attitude that is contrary to the things of the Lord. He is aware of the fact that not until he stands in resurrection life with a redeemed body will he be totally free from the taint of sin. This is why our Lord himself taught in the great Lord's Prayer that we are daily to pray, "Lead us not into temptation" (Matt. 6:13). The pressures are so great, the opposing forces so subtle, that it is easy to succumb.

Let us not take this stand. If any man deny sin, if any man says he cannot sin, he deceives himself, and the truth is not in him. Then what is the remedy? It is always the same thing; it is to walk in the light--to face reality. Specifically, as the apostle puts it, it is to confess our sins. Regardless of whether we have deluded ourselves into thinking there is no root of sin in us any more, it will still be there and it will keep right on producing sins, and all the more if we think there is no need to guard against it. Well then, face the sins, John says. Take a good look at them and agree with God about them. The light reveals them to be there.

Remember the word of the Lord himself? Out of the heart of man, he says, proceed murders, adulteries, fornications, evil thoughts, and so on. All these things come from within. The root is still planted deep within our physical natures, and we shall not escape it until the body is redeemed. Of course, we do not need to yield to it--that is the point of redemption. As we learn to walk in the Spirit there can be protracted periods of time when we walk free from the taint of sin. Ah, but when we do sin, do not try to hide it, do not cover it over, do not, out of some mistaken notion that you will lower yourself in the estimation of someone else, refuse to acknowledge sin. Confess it, say what it is--anger or malice, envy or lust, jealousy or selfishness or ambition--any of these things. Do not deny them and do not deny the root. Face the reality, the apostle says, confess these fruits when they do appear.

Agreeing with God

Now the word confess, as you may know, does not mean to ask for forgiveness, and we will see why in a moment. Christ's work for us upon the cross has already done all that is necessary to forgive us. What God wants us to do is to look at the sin before us and call it what he calls it. That means to agree with God about it. The word confess comes from a Greek word which means "to say the same thing." To say with God what he says about this thing is to confess sin. There is a popular song which you sometimes hear in Christian circles:

If I have wounded any soul today,

If I have caused one foot to go astray,

If I have lived in my own selfish way,

Dear Lord, forgive.

That is not confession at all. The "if's" take it out of the realm of confession. Do not say "if," say, "Lord, I have caused some foot to go astray, I have lived in my own selfish way." That is confession, that is agreeing with God.

When you agree with God about these things, what happens? We are told, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). Sometimes, I might add, there is need for confession not only to God, but to others who are injured by what we do. There is need, often, for restitution. If we are honestly saying what God says about it, then we need to do something about it. We need to remedy the harm we have done as much as possible, and God will sometimes demand this of us. Often, no sense of forgiveness is granted to us until we have moved in restitution. Ah, but when we look at it as he does, then he says we are cleansed. The cleansing is based upon the work of Jesus Christ. On that basis God is "faithful and just" to forgive us, and he would be utterly unjust if he refused to forgive a penitent sinner. God himself would be wicked if he refused, on the basis of the work of Christ, to forgive one who confesses his sins. That is how certain we can be of the cleansing that comes when we agree with God about these things.

Do you remember how our Lord himself dramatized this for us in the solemnity of the Last Supper, before he went to the cross? Gathered with his disciples in the upper room, he took a basin and a towel and girded himself and set about to wash the feet of his disciples. You recall, as he came to Peter, Peter shook his head and said, "You shall never wash my feet" (John 13:8). Jesus then said these significant words, "If I do not wash you, you have no part with me" (John 13:8). Peter did not understand all that meant until years later. But we can see that what our Lord meant was, "Peter, here is the key to fellowship. You can be related to me by sharing my life, but you do not have any fellowship with me unless you let me wash your feet." Peter, in his impetuosity, always plunging himself to the full into everything, replied, "Lord, if that's the case, then wash me all over." Again the Lord had to correct him. "No, Peter, he that is bathed does not need to wash again." That first cleansing of redemption, that coming to Christ which washes away the guilt of the past, the coming to Christ which washes away the guilt of the past, the Adamic guilt, that is "bathing all over." Jesus said he who is so bathed does not need to wash all over again, but he does need to wash his feet. This is what John is talking about here, this repeated washing of the feet. Whenever we are aware of having fallen into a fleshly reaction, into sins, then let us stop right there and in our hearts before God agree with God about it and experience anew this wonderful cleansing, this faithful and righteous cleansing of our lives, "cleansing from all unrighteousness." That is keeping the feet not based upon God's mercy or his kindness or his love; it clean.

Do you know what happens when you do not keep your feet clean? You become very unpleasant to live with. As a schoolboy in Montana I endured many bitter winters when the temperature would sometimes go down to 60¡ below zero for a week at a time. In those homes where we had no running water, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity, taking a bath was akin to major surgery. We had to go out and get the c-o-l-d galvanized iron washtub off the wall, bring it in and put it on the kitchen floor, then pour heated water into it from the stove. Where the water touched the tub, it was hot, but where it did not, it was cold. In that painful setting we performed our ablutions. It was difficult enough and distressing enough that some people did not think it necessary to bathe at all during the winter months. If you went into the heat of a one--room schoolhouse on a cold winter's day, with about 50 or 60 sweating bodies there, you became very much aware of this fact.

Now I do not mind living with someone who knows his feet get dirty and who therefore frequently washes them, but it is terribly distressing to live with someone who thinks his feet never get dirty. That is what John is saying. If we say we cannot get dirty feet, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we face up to it and confess it and agree with God about it (and that is sometimes hard to do because we want so desperately to get him to agree with us), well then, the cleansing that the Lord Jesus has fully and abundantly provided for on the cross is immediately ours, and we are as though we had never sinned.

Chapter 5

The Man Who Rationalizes Sin

1 John 1:10-2:2

Now we come to the third of these ways of avoiding light, the case of the man who rationalizes the sin which the light reveals. It is described for us in chapter one, verse 10, and, ignoring the chapter break, the first two verses of chapter two.

If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Here is the person who rationalizes sin. I do not hesitate to say that this is the most common obstacle of all, the most common failure in Christian experience. In the first case we referred to, the man does not like what the light reveals so he keeps himself too busy ever to see it. In the second case, the person says there is no need for light because, he says, I cannot sin, therefore I shall just go on living the Christian life as I see it, since there is an automatic something in me that keeps me from falling into sin. But in this third case, the person is saying, of course I can sin as a Christian; I know this. I do need light. But when I stop to look at my life and examine myself what I see is not sin. Weakness and failure perhaps, but not sin. I may have to admit that I have been weak, but I have not sinned. Now that is what John means. "If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us."

Essentially this is an evasion of fact, an avoidance of reality. It is the exercise of that terrible power of the human mind which we call rationalization, the ability to clothe wrong so that it looks right, and evil so that it looks good. Who of us has not experienced this? We are all experts at it. We know well how to invent reasons to do what we want to do, and how to invent equally valid--sounding reasons to avoid what we want to avoid. There are always perfectly understandable circumstances that keep us from doing these things. That is rationalization. In other words, it is the tendency to tone down an unpleasant, or unacceptable reality. We do that with the word "sin." Many people really do not know what the word means, but all of us have an uncomfortable feeling about it. We know that it suggests something bad and we do not like to use it about ourselves. So we have invented some very fancy names for it.

By Any Other Name

What the Scripture calls sin, we call human frailty, or bad tendencies, or simply weakness, or a hereditary fault, or an environmental kick-back. The fancier the name the more we like it, because it sounds so much better than that simple, ugly, three-letter word, sin. It is just as if you went through your medicine cabinet, took out all the bottles of poison, and relabeled them "perfume," "hand lotion," and so on. It does not change the character of the poison, but it does make it sound a lot better. The evil twist of our fallen natures is revealed in the fact that what others do we call sin, but when we do the same thing, we have a different name for it. Others have prejudices; we have convictions. Others are conceited; but we have self-respect. When another man is lazy, we say so; but when we do not want to do something, we say we are too busy. When someone else goes ahead and acts on his own, we say he is presumptuous; when we do the same thing, we have initiative. When someone else gets angry and blows up, we say he has lost his temper; but when we do that, we are merely showing righteous indignation. As long as we can find a nicer label we will never treat the thing like the poison it is.

Now we may laugh at these things, but these are the reasons why we are weak as Christians. As long as we laugh at them, we will never do anything about them. We say, "Oh well, everyone does it. It is so common, even the Christians at church all do it." As long as we take that attitude we shall always be in the grip of evil. We will never treat these things as the poison they are as long as we permit ourselves to paste perfume labels on them. Also, we will never understand why we still go around crippled and ailing and acting as though some poison were sapping the spiritual strength from our lives.

Another way we rationalize our sins is to excuse them because of the pressure of our current circumstances We say it is nerves that causes us to speak impatiently to one another. Or it is tiredness, fatigue, that makes us utter sharp words at home. We blame the pressure of work for losing our peace and making us worried, troubled, and harassed. We say it is our difficult neighbors who make us resentful and bitter. If it were not for them we could be sweet, lovely, and kind. We do not need the cleansing of the blood of Christ. Obviously, if we sinned we would need that, but what we are saying is, we do not sin. Rather, we need to have our tensions unraveled by our psychiatrist. We are saying, "I know I shouldn't have said that, or done this thing, but it's not really my fault. I can't help it. It's because of the circumstances and therefore is not really sin. Sin is deliberate, sin is willful, but I can't help myself and so I have not sinned."

Put the Blame on God

Now put that alongside what John has said. "If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us" (1:10). He says this is not only an evasion of reality, but it is also a direct accusation against God. We make him a liar, he says, and his word is not in us. In other words, we are not shifting the blame to some unknown, unstated individual, we are putting it squarely on God. The Christian always lives in direct relationship to God. There are only two people in life, as far as your basic relationship is concerned--you and God. So if we say it is not our fault, we are saying it is his fault. "It's your fault, God, not mine. These circumstances that you've allowed me to get involved with make it impossible for me to obey you. Therefore, you're to blame. I want to do it. You know my heart; you know that I really want to be what I ought to be, but because of these circumstances I can't, so it's really your fault."

That is the oldest excuse in the world; it goes back to the Garden of Eden. When God came looking for man, he said to him, "Why did you do this thing?" And man said, "It's the woman you gave me. It's your fault." And when God said to the woman, "Why did you do it?" she said, "It is the serpent. It's your fault because you let him talk to me." So, the blame comes right back to God. We are, in effect, calling God a rascal and a double-crosser. But John uses even a worse name. He says, "we make him a liar." The Word of God makes clear that the Christian has a source of strength in Christ that is imparted to him from within. We are inwardly strengthened by him. As Paul puts it, "the inward man is [being] renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:16, KJV). The outer man can perish but the inner man is being renewed daily. Therefore, nothing outward should hinder us.

In Romans, Paul cries, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" (Rom. 8:35). Then he goes through the list of possibilities. Can life, or death, or things present (your circumstances), or things to come (the pressure of the future), or height, or depth, or time, or eternity, or anything else in all creation, separate us from the love of Christ? His answer is, no, none of these things can cut us off from the strength of Christ, the love of Christ. But that is not what we say. We say to God, yes, there are many things that cut me off from you and make it impossible for me to do what you ask me to do. Difficulties cut me off, and fatigue, and sickness, and pressure. Therefore, God, you're a liar. You say that none of these things will do it; I say they do. Now one of us is not telling the truth; one of us is lying, and I know who it is, it's you!

Now think of the enormity of that charge! Here is what we are constantly saying to God! Lord, it is your fault; you are not true. Here we are, mere human pigmies, standing before the faithful and unchanging God, the God who has revealed himself as without a shadow of turning, absolutely faithful; and we are charging him with faithlessness. We glory in the unchangeableness of God when it adds to our comfort. We love to speak of the unchanging God, the Refuge from every kind of pres sure. Yet, how strange it is that we can stand before him the next moment and defiantly assert that the reason for our weakness is not our failure, but his. We declare he is not faithful to his word, he does not keep his promises, he denies himself, he is a liar.

I have often quoted 1 Corinthians 10:13 to Christians in difficult circumstances, "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it." I have had people look me right in the eye and say without batting an eyelid, "That's not true. I have been tempted already above what I've been able to bear. I can't stand this thing." How many times do we say that, in one way or another? But what is that but calling God a liar? Do we realize it is impossible for God to be wrong and us to be right? If that were true, we would be God, not he. It is simply an impossibility. We need to read again the Book of Job and see how Job learned this great lesson. Because he was going through terrible pain and hardship, his heart protested and cried out against God. There came a time when God said to Job,

"Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?

He who argues with God, let him answer it."

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

"Gird up your loins like a man;

I will question you, and you declare to me.

Will you even put me in the wrong?

Will you condemn me that you may be justified?

Have you an arm like God,

and can you thunder with a voice like his?" (Job 40:2, 6-9).

In that amazing fortieth chapter God puts to Job a series of test questions, asking Job if he can perform even the simplest functions which God performs every day. And Job's answer is,

"Behold, I am of small account;

what shall I answer thee?

I lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, and I will not answer;

twice, but I will proceed no further.

therefore I despise myself,

and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 40:4,5; 42:6).

The blunt truth is, we do not like where God puts us. We do not like the people or the pressures we have to live under, we do not like the circumstances that surround us, and we refuse to accept them. That is the real problem. Therefore we are not interested in Christ's power to live in them. We do not want it. We have set our will against God's will.

Now let us be honest and admit that we fall because we do not choose to meet the circumstances with his strength. Rather, we run away from them and blame it all on God. No wonder we lose fellowship. No wonder God seems to be our enemy, and things all go wrong. We find that peace has fled our hearts, we are troubled, harassed, worried, and upset. We find ourselves flying off the handle even more easily, and losing our patience, and we are baffled by it all, not knowing what is causing all this. Does this sound familiar?

Me for the Defense!

John explains what the trouble is. In verse 1, chapter 2, he says,

My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the expiation for our sins.

What does he mean? Just this. There is never any need to sin, but if we find ourselves doing so we have a perfect defense available to us; a defense which the Father will gladly receive, one that he already assures us will be welcomed. We have an Advocate with the Father, who will rush to our defense immediately. But his defense is of no avail to us as long as we are still defending ourselves. There cannot be two advocates in this case. You either rely on his defense of you--the manifestation of his work on your behalf which has wiped away every stain, every sin which you ever will commit or ever have committed--or you must rely upon your own defense. Here you are, standing before God, defiantly telling him that you are

not to blame, that you have a defense. You are not guilty. You can explain all this by the pressure of circumstances.

Now, you see, as long as you remain defiant or evasive, you are still justifying and excusing yourself and therefore the Judge can only condemn you, and permit the inevitable, built-in judgment that follows, to upset you, overthrow you, harass you, baffle you, and leave you in weakness and folly. But if you will stop justifying yourself, he will justify you. The blood of Jesus Christ cannot cleanse excuses. It only cleanses sins. If we will say, "Yes, it wasn't the pressure, it wasn't the circumstances, it wasn't that these things are not as bad as you call them; it's that I chose to be impatient, I chose to be resentful. I decided to be worried and to let anxiety grip me." If we come to that place, then we discover that here is One who stands before the Father and reveals to him the righteousness of his own life, and God sees us in him, and we are cleansed and accepted. Strength again flows into the inner man, peace comes back to our hearts, we are cleansed of our sin, washed and restored to the grace of Go